Jane Gardam’s Characters: Organically Grown

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This piece was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.

1.The names alone hint at underlying complexities: Old Filth, Polly Flint, Fred Fiscal-Smith, Bilgewater (whose given name is Marigold). Jane Gardam’s characters have enormously involved inner lives, but rather than waste time telling us this, she instead grows them — like a patient, experienced gardener — as we read. Like late-season flowers, or heirloom tomatoes ripening slowly on the vine, the people in Gardam’s stories become who they are organically; and the results are intensely rewarding. Gardam’s gifts as a writer are many: a sly black humor alongside true compassion, the ability to paint a vivid picture of the English countryside with just a few verbal strokes, and an ear for the way people speak past each other in service to their own marvelous trains of thought. Her characters unfold, mysteriously and in their own time, demonstrating both her love for them and her unobtrusively steely control as a writer.

Hers is clearly a mature talent: Gardam didn’t sit down to write what would become her first collection of short stories until she was 41. But even in her first works, written for children, a reader can sense a lifetime of thoughtful observation — and the even hand of a veteran gardener, which, it turns out, she is. While the precocious young narrator of her first novel, A Long Way from Verona, opens her story with a firm refutation of the author’s method —

I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine. I will make this clear at once because I have noticed that if things seep out slowly through a book the reader is apt to feel let down or tricked in some way when he eventually gets the point.

— Gardam takes great pleasure, here and in the more than 30 books that would follow, in proving her wrong.

2.
Jane Gardam was born Jean Mary Pearson in July of 1928, in Coatham, a former fishing community in North Yorkshire. Her father was the son of a farmer turned schoolteacher, and a well-loved housemaster at Sir William Turner’s School. Her mother’s formal education ended at age 12 — she had a bad heart and wasn’t expected to last long, though she ended up living to 90 — but she was a dedicated letter writer, possessed of great faith in the power of words.

Gardam always knew she wanted to be a writer. She wrote stories as a child, but furtively, and hid her first efforts in the chimney of the unused fireplace in her bedroom. “In those days in Yorkshire, you never had a fire in your bedroom unless you were very ill,” she told Lucasta Miller in a 2005 Guardian interview. The winter she was six she came down with chicken pox, a fire was lit before she could protest, and all her work literally went up in flames. That year would also provide another trauma by fire, in which she burnt both hands severely in an accident; at 85, she still bears the scars. And soon after that, her mother nearly died of scarlet fever after giving birth to her brother.

That year of pain and uncertainty changed something in her, she recalls: “That was the end of the happy little girl.” Books were a deep source of comfort, and when a library opened in her hometown when she was eight, she decided that she would someday go to London “to be among people who cared about books as much as I did.” And indeed, at 17 Gardam earned a scholarship to read English at Bedford College, University of London. She planned on a career in literary scholarship, and did good work on a thesis on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But she was forced to abandon it after running out of money, and on graduating went straight to work.

She put in time as a researcher, then as a Red Cross Traveling Librarian for hospital libraries for two years, and eventually as a journalist, first as sub-editor at Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal, and finally as an assistant literary editor at Time and Tide. She had met David Gardam, an up-and-coming young barrister, at a party while still at university, and they were married in 1952. When she gave birth to her first son, Timothy, in 1956, she left her job at Time and Tide, vowing to be back in three weeks. But as her other children came along — Kitty, and then Tom — she settled into life as a wife and mother at home.

David Gardam’s law career provided comfortably for the family. He was often away, however, traveling abroad in the service of construction litigation, and keeping the home front together was a full-time job. It wasn’t until her youngest son started school — that same morning, as she tells it — that she finally found the time and space to write. And the floodgates opened.

Gardam wrote and wrote. “Without writing,” she told the Guardian, “I would have been bored and unfaithful, maybe both.” Instead she finished a collection of short stories for young adults, A Fair Few Days, in 1970, and promptly sent it off to a publisher. Having no idea how the business worked, she called back three weeks later to see what was taking them so long (“‘There’s an awful woman on the phone,’ was the first response. ‘Get rid of her.'”) But an editor at Hamish Hamilton liked it, and contracted her for a second as well, and she was on her way. In a recent interview, she admits, “I think I would have died if it hadn’t been published. I was desperate to get started — I was possessed.”

3.As of this year, Jane Gardam has published 12 young adult books, 10 adult novels, and eight short story collections, as well as a retelling of the Green Man myth with illustrator Mary Fedder and a work of nonfiction about the landscape of her childhood, The Iron Coast: Photographs of Yorkshire. She is the only writer to have won the Whitbread Award — now the Costa — twice, for The Hollow Land in 1983 and The Queen of the Tambourine in 1991, and has been awarded countless other prizes as well. God on the Rocks was nominated for a Booker; Old Filth for the Orange Prize, and in 1999 Gardam received the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature.

Her lifetime’s contribution covers a lot of ground, but a dedicated reader will recognize recurring themes. She is interested in England, of course — Gardam’s characters and general tone are quintessentially British, even when the story is set elsewhere. And along with that particular Britishness comes a fascination with Empire, the bill of goods sold to an entire nation which began to exhibit its first fault lines as her generation came of age.

Even more than the cracks in the façade of England’s nationalism, Gardam is fascinated by the ways its people construct personal walls — which are also prone to crumbling at inopportune moments. Life doles out its misfortunes to her players, and she shines, as a writer, when she chronicles the struggles between their inner and outer lives. She is never heavy-handed here. Characters move through their emotional and psychological battles under her sympathetic gaze — an awareness that the line between decorum and breakdown can be very thin indeed. Or, as Courtney Cook describes Gardam’s novels in the LA Review of Books, “they are a taxonomy of ordinary madness, and by that I mean the kind of madness that does not require a visit to an institution, or at least, not often.”

4.Perhaps her best portrait of this “ordinary madness” is that of Eliza Peabody in The Queen of the Tambourine. This epistolary novel traces Eliza’s mental descent and ascent — although it’s never quite so clearcut a progression as that — through a series of letters she writes to Joan, her neighbor across the street, who has abandoned their proper, middle-class suburb for a series of exotic locales: Prague, Kurdistan, India. Or has she? Is there, in fact, a Joan? Eliza’s state of mind is never quite identifiable enough for the reader to relax into knowing that this is one kind of story or another, and Gardam obviously takes pleasure in letting us proceed in this fashion.

Eliza is ditsy — “You have a grasshopper mind,” a friend’s husband tells her — but also serious, pained, and terribly funny. Her husband leaves her, neighbors fuss over her condescendingly, she sees an Oxford don suddenly dissolve and trickle down a drain, and through it all she muses with a dispassionate eye, pathetic one moment and hilariously arch the next. Through her letters, Gardam captures the sudden realizations of middle age as only a fellow-traveler could:

I looked along my skinny body, half a century old: the purple ridge, the appendix scar, the blotches of the old-fashioned vaccination marks on my thigh, but all still serviceable enough. A body not much noticed since the womb. Unused.

What might it have looked like? If I had married a man who thought sharing a bed important? Fat and flaccid? Covered in stretch-marks and Appalachian ranges? I’ve never seen a stretch-mark and don’t know what it looks like. I have never seen a contraceptive pill. I have never seen pot or hash or heroin. I’ve never actually examined a condom, and still feel they are rather secret, nasty things.

Bosoms. Scarcely there. They might, I suppose, by now be hanging like old leather bottles? The children saying, “Mother’s letting herself go. Such a shame.”

But I’d have looked used.

Yet Gardam is not above having some fun at her own expense, and Eliza’s description of a self-important neighbor who writes children’s books is catty, self-deprecating, and extremely funny:

With the solicitor husband and his international practice, the five healthy children all now at boarding-school and scarcely needing her, with her own effulgent bounce and so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it, she now writes fiction…She is always being interviewed on television as the fully mature woman with the perfect life. She is asked her views on Margaret Drabble and Proust, at least she was until she confused the two.

Among other afflictions, Eliza lost her mother young. In fact, many of Gardam’s characters are orphans of one sort or another. There are the literal kind, like the eponymous Faith Fox, or Polly Flint of Crusoe’s Daughter, whose mothers die at birth and are given up to relatives or friends by fathers who are unable to care for them, and also the children known as “Raj orphans” — born to parents stationed in the colonies and sent back to England at a tender age, alone or with siblings, to be raised and schooled in civilization, without their parents. Gardam may have grown up in an intact family, but she is consistently interested in exploring how the injured child informs the outwardly functional adult. These explorations into the reverberations of loss echo through her 40 years of writing, but are probably most skillfully — and most touchingly — realized in the three books that make up her “Old Filth” trilogy: Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Last Friends.

5.Old Filth, considered by many to be Gardam’s best book, is the story of Edward Feathers, a Queen’s Counsel barrister who made his fortune practicing in Hong Kong. His nickname, Filth, comes not from any lack of personal hygiene, but from a vaguely derogatory acronym used about lawyers who fled the home country: Failed In London, Try Hong Kong. The book opens on his final years; he and his wife, Betty, have retired from Asia to the quiet countryside of Dorset, and Betty dies one afternoon while planting tulips.

Feathers has spent the better part of his life cultivating an impression that everyone around him seems to agree on: he is exemplary, immaculate, and a bit boring. But Old Filth is not quite what he seems, and Betty’s death begins to unmoor him — not all at once, of course, and here Gardam is at the top of her form, building her story, and the characters who inhabit it, with great subtlety and perceptiveness. Old Filth takes the reader on a journey as complex as that of Feathers’s inner workings, which turn out to be very complex indeed. Based partly on Rudyard Kipling’s tales of his own Raj orphanhood, particularly his short story “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” Gardam has given her protagonist some terrible — and terribly sad — secrets to carry. He explains his and Betty’s childlessness to a young woman:

If you’ve not been loved as a child, you don’t know how to love a child. You need prior knowledge…I was not loved after the age of four and a half. Think of being a parent like that.

Gardam never hurries to unburden herself of Feathers’s burdens, though, and neither does she condescend to her readers. He’s as complicated a character as anyone you might meet, or know, or simply wonder about. And she carries these dense lives through the rest of the trilogy, The Man in the Wooden Hat — Betty’s side of the story — and 2013’s Last Friends, which brings in several peripheral characters and manages to make the story interesting all over again. Clearly this is a labor of love — she referred to Feathers as “my little boy” in a recent WNYC interview — but the time she has spent with these characters also reflects a willingness to let a story grow at its own pace — a gardener’s sensibility.

In a Publisher’s Weekly interview that explicitly dubbed her a “Late Bloomer,” Gardam explains,“I couldn’t have written any earlier. I wasn’t ready. I was a very anxious sort of woman.” Clearly she waited just long enough: there is no anxiety to her work. Rather, she has a kind of authorial green thumb. Gardam understands the beauty of coaxing something to unfold over time, and trusts her readers with the patience to watch her stories grow.

This piece was produced in partnership with Bloom, a new site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.
1.
ekphrasis (/'ek.fr ə-səs\): a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art; from the Greek ἔκφρασις (ekphrasis, “description”), from ekphrazein, to recount, describe; from ex- out + phrazein to point out, explain.
It’s no coincidence that ekphrasis shares its prefix with ecstasy. Originally used as a rhetorical device, ekphrasis — a technique for translating music, performance, or visual art into words — has traditionally gone beyond objective description, past art theory or criticism, to express an emotion or make some kind of subjective declaration. And often — because after all, this is art we’re talking about — that assertion is one of great joy. From Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa,” the best art about art is born out of passion for the original.
But what happens when the work in question is too wonderful for words? How might a writer go about describing the indescribable — a painting, for instance — so moving, so sexy, so game-changing as to defy the vocabulary of formal analysis?
Maybe he doesn’t. Perhaps, instead of relying on the conventional tools of ekphrasis, such a work demands that the tale of its equally ecstatic creation be told instead. Thomas Van Essen’sThe Center of the World is such a novel, and it may not surprise a receptive reader that it has a few things to say as well about beauty and decay, luck and the gods, class, mortality, and the power of art to transform lives.
2.The Center of the World is, simply, the story of a painting. But the eponymous painting, a full-figure portrait of Helen of Troy by the 19th-century British landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, turns out to be more than just oil on canvas. It is imbued, somehow, with Helen’s mystical beauty and erotic life force, and as the book moves between the story of its creation in the 1830s and its rediscovery in 2003, the reader is treated to tantalizing glimpses — but glimpses only — into how this came to be.
In fact, there is no work called “The Center of the World.” While Joseph Mallord William Turner occasionally painted figure studies, his reputation rested almost entirely on his stunning treatment of light in landscape. But in Van Essen’s fictional world, the painting’s existence is entirely believable.
We first meet Turner at Petworth, the majestic Sussex estate of the Third Earl of Egremont. Lord Egremont is a salonnière and patron of the arts, holding court to a mix of gentry, commoners, and artists with his mistress, the lovely Mrs. Spencer. She and Charles Grant, a recent guest of Egremont’s, become good friends; theirs are the voices narrating the birth of “The Center of the World.” Eventually Turner asks each to model for him; she is to be his Helen, Grant her Paris. The result is a stunning, almost alchemically powerful work that enthralls, entices, and — in one way or another — enslaves everyone who views it.
The painting is no less potent a century and a half later, when Henry Leiden discovers it on his family’s upstate New York property, wrapped up and hidden behind a barn wall. Leiden is a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-management guy, long-married and vaguely sad about practically everything. Finding the painting changes all that in an instant — not only the thought of the fortune an original Turner might bring, but the sudden possibilities of a world where such beauty can exist. He has never seen anything like “The Center of the World” — nor, as it turns out, has the unscrupulous Manhattan art dealer Arthur Bryce, but he has been following its trail for a while. Bryce enlists his pretty young go-getter of an assistant, Gina, to help track it down, and it’s through Gina’s and Henry’s eyes that we watch the painting’s 21st-century trajectory.
3.
A painting goes on a journey; a painting comes to town. The Center of the World is a great yarn and a bit of a thriller, but it’s also an arresting expression of the inexpressible. Part of that is literal, and obviously intentional. Although Van Essen describes its components — Helen, barely clothed, waiting for Paris, her jewels discarded on the floor, soldiers locked in battle on the field seen through her window — most of it is left to the reader to visualize. And though we know it strikes lust into the heart of every viewer, how that’s done is up to us to decide as well. Van Essen's words do the same work as Turner's brushstrokes: he implies, working around the actual image by describing, instead, the reactions it inspires. A young prostitute, hired off a London street by one of the painting’s owners in the 1930s, attests:
I had seen a lot of paintings, sir, and I had seen my share of French postcards that showed all sorts of things, but I never seen nothing like this. It made me feel all shimmery inside, like I was on fire, and it brought a smile to my face so I almost forgot who I was and why I was there.
Much as Turner used light and reflection to model a figure in space, Van Essen uses the passion of viewers for “The Center of the World” to stand in for the painting itself.
The act of creation is also a major touchstone. Turner is a wonderfully odd and prickly character, and Van Essen does a fine job of teasing out how a master painter might think about what he does:
All of this. This wine. This meat. This house. This countryside. And all the shades of light that illuminate them. It is all a burden. A blessing, too, of course, because, you know, we wouldn’t have anything if it were not for everything. But for the artist, you see, all this is a burden, a weight. Sometimes I feel it on my shoulders, pressing me down. Or a curtain. Heavy rich stuff — some tapestry, you know. One can’t see truth through it. But I do what I can. Sometimes a speck of light peeps through.
Light, as a subject, is fleeting. And, as every artist knows, so is beauty. Even as Van Essen is bewitching us with Turner’s magical painting, there is also a strong backbeat of memento mori running through the narrative. As Turner tells Grant,
The passage of the past to the present, of youth to age, of the golden age to the dismal one, the rise of empires and their fall. Most fellows don’t think of it as they paint, but one must, since it takes so damn long to execute a painting and nothing is as it was when you started.
Or, as a private investigator describes Henry Leiden’s house on the page just preceding, “There’s nothing here…. Just the same old same old. Middle age and all that shit. Some day it will bite you in the ass too. Just you wait.”
Both Grant and Mrs. Spencer find modeling for Turner deeply unpleasant, the artist’s intense objectification discomfiting to a former courtesan and a homosexual man. Both feel physical beauty to be a blessing and a curse, and their ambivalence draws them together. But that is no concern of Turner’s; he is interested only in what needs to be created in the moment. Even he can’t explain his sudden need to paint the figure, when it has not historically been his strong suit: “[I] had my doubts. Not my usual line, you know…. I thought perhaps I might be mad. See the thing for one thing when in fact it is another. Enthusiasm can lead one astray — it’s hard to trust it.” Not this time, however. He has the chance to make beauty last, and he will not be denied.
4.
Thomas Van Essen knows a few things about creativity’s insistence.
A self-described literary-magazine type in high school, Van Essen went on to Amherst, which proved to be a bit too much “like boarding school with beer.” He transferred to Sarah Lawrence, which was more to his taste; his girlfriend — now his wife — was there, and Grace Paley, Tom Lux, Clarence Major, and Jane Cooper were on the school’s stellar writing faculty. Van Essen studied with Joseph Papaleo and E.L. Doctorow, whose “Writing a Novel” class was a fine place for an aspiring young author. Students critiqued each other’s work in class, met with Doctorow individually whenever they completed 50 new pages, and got to hear him read pieces of his work in progress, Ragtime.
Van Essen went on to graduate school at Rutgers, where he studied English — mainly Victorian — literature, and wrote his dissertation on Wilkie Collins. (The Collins family makes a cameo appearance in The Center of the World.) But as his degree was moving along, so was the rest of life. He married after leaving Sarah Lawrence, and had two children by the time he completed his Ph.D. Teaching was enjoyable, but family life called for something a little steadier.
He ended up taking a job writing test questions for Princeton’s Educational Testing Service — first logical reasoning questions for the GRE and then analogies and reading comprehension questions for the SAT, where his close reading skills proved to be an asset. He was a good manager as well, and rose up steadily through the ranks.
Van Essen fully intended to keep writing. Just because his academic dreams hadn’t worked out, he thought, he could still write at home, at night, after the kids were in bed. And he did — after a few years he had what he felt was a good, “Paul Auster-ish” detective novel. He found an agent, and the book made some rounds, but ultimately she couldn’t place it. “After she started asking me to pay for photocopies,” he says, “I gave up,” and spent the next decade concentrating on his family and career.
Life was comfortable, and he was good at what he did. But in 2003 he turned 50, and one evening, out of the blue, that creative longing reared its head with a vengeance. As he told Other Press in a recent interview:
I was the last one left in the office; I had just gotten off the phone with a very demanding client and I knew that I had done a pretty good job of handling a complicated situation. In some universe I should have been very pleased with myself, but I just felt empty and depressed. Is this what I really want out of life? Is this all there is? I had stopped writing after I had failed to find a publisher for my first novel ...but I knew that I needed to go back to it.
What he needed to do, Van Essen decided, was just write — not worry about publishing, or declare himself an artist or join a writers’ group, but just get the ideas on paper. He had an idea that had been in the back of his mind since graduate school, and he needed to follow it through:
I made this deal with myself. I would get up an hour and half early every morning and write before I went to work. No adolescent agonizing, just produce some prose every day. All I had to do, I figured, was write 200 words a day, or 1,000 words a week. 50,000 words a year and I’d have a novel in two years. Piece of cake. It was, of course, more complicated than that and the two years turned to three and to four between living and crossing stuff out, but I stuck with it because I fell in love with what I was doing.
That love, of course, is what it takes. Like Turner in his borrowed garret at Petworth, Van Essen worked in private — only his wife and a couple of close friends even knew he was writing — until his vision was ready.
5.
We will never know what “The Center of the World” really looks like, or what its hold over its witnesses actually involves. But Turner is the first to admit he doesn’t know what Helen truly looked like. He asks Grant:
But what about "the face that launched a thousand ships" and all that? She surely must have looked like something.
Grant offers:
But that is Marlowe, not Homer. And Marlowe put it as a question. What Faustus saw before him was a boy actor smeared with paint and covered with horsehair. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" I think not. Shakespeare came closer to the mark when he has Ulysses describe her as "a theme of honor and renown." He understood that she was not flesh so much as an idea.
And so it serves the reader well to remember that “The Center of the World” is not so much pigment on canvas as an idea — about the impulse that drives people to make art, and the wish to apprehend time and beauty for a satisfying instance. That Turner was sure of what he was doing was his gift; that Van Essen allows his ekphrasis enough ambiguity for ecstasy is our good fortune.

This interview was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.
The Jewish immigrant tale has become a popular American creation myth, especially for readers who came of age in the second half of the last century. It comes fully imbued with hope, bravery, and a retrospective level of assimilative success, not to mention its own handsome national monument -- Ellis Island.
The story is well established from a New York perspective. Thanks to a rich written history, from Henry Roth to Chaim Potok to Isaac Bashevis Singer to Betty Smith, most people know at least a portion of the Ellis Island/Lower East Side narrative. But Jews settled in other parts of the country as well: Massachusetts, California, and the Midwest, with a particularly vibrant community forming in Chicago.
Yet this piece of the story is still underrepresented in American arts and letters. The names of so many New York born-and-bred Jewish writers are canonical by now: Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick come to mind without much thought at all; given another minute I could name two dozen more. Coming up with the names of literary Jews who identify their stories of origin with the rest of the United States -- particularly the Midwest -- isn't so easy. Even Chicago's favorite maggid, Saul Bellow, was born in Canada.
Ronna Wineberg's recent debut novel, On Bittersweet Place (Relegation Books, 2014), which was excerpted at Bloom this past Monday, takes a familiar narrative -- a large Jewish family flees post-October Revolution Russia to make a better life in America -- and roots it firmly in 1920s Chicago. The story of the Czernitski family, as seen through the eyes of teenage narrator Lena, is both recognizable and slightly strange. There is no Lower East Side, no Garment District. Rather Lena, her brother, Simon, her parents, and her numerous aunts and uncles play out their stories against the backdrop of Michigan Avenue, Independence Boulevard, Bittersweet Place (a real street in the heart of Chicago), the Art Institute of Chicago, the shores of Lake Michigan. Their world is subtly -- but importantly -- different from the one many of us have encountered before in literature. It gives us fresh eyes on a story we think we may have seen before. On Bittersweet Place is as much the coming-of-age story of the Midwest as a diverse and thriving urban center as it is Lena’s. I caught up with Ronna Wineberg to talk about the novel, the history behind it, and, of course, Chicago.
Lisa Peet: Aside from having lived there as a child yourself, why did you set Lena’s story in Chicago? Are you familiar with the actual street, Bittersweet Place, or did you pick it for the name?
Ronna Wineberg: Most fiction about Jewish immigrants takes place in New York. I wanted to explore a different setting. The Midwest has a specific sensibility, softer than that of New York. I imagined Chicago would be a less harsh place for Lena and her family. And Chicago is a beautiful city. Lake Michigan and the beach are easy to access; I thought they could become part of the story. Also, my mother’s family came to Chicago from Russia. She was the first child born in America. Her parents, older siblings, aunts, and uncles arrived at Ellis Island and made their way to the Midwest. Because of this, it seemed natural to set an immigrant novel in Chicago.
An aunt and uncle of mine lived on Bittersweet Place before I was born. I’d heard the name of the street many times and I’d been there; the image stayed with me. When I began writing the novel, I immediately thought of Bittersweet Place as the street where Lena and her family could live.
LP: Is there actually a Belilovka, the Russian town Lena’s family escapes from?
RW: Belilovka is a real place. My grandfather was born there. However, the events in my family’s history didn’t happen there. I chose Belilovka because of the rhythmic sound of the name.
LP: What do you know about your own family’s history? How did it influence or inform On Bittersweet Place?
RW: The house where I grew up was filled with visitors, relatives who spoke with thick accents. Although I’m a second-generation American, I felt as if I had a foot in each world. I wasn’t quite comfortable with my family’s immigrant past, and I didn’t quite belong in the world of my American friends either. I knew I wanted to write about this, and once I found Lena’s voice, she led the way.
For years, I didn’t know much about my family’s background. When I was in college, some of my cousins and I talked with my mother’s family about Russia. We sat in the living room of my parents’ house and asked questions of our grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We were riveted by their stories and decided to record the conversations on cassette tapes. We interviewed relatives on other occasions, too. The discussions were lively; people disagreed about what had happened in the past. My great-grandfather had been murdered in Russia. My great uncle, a man in his late 60s, described the murder to us and as he did, he cried. That moment stayed with me.
The family did flee from Russia, and my grandparents were separated for years because of World War I. I never learned the details of their relationship, but I was struck by the circumstances. The Russian portions of On Bittersweet Place are loosely based on family history.
LP: How is the Jewish immigrant story different in the Midwest, and Chicago in particular? How did regional differences shape the trajectory of assimilation?
RW: In 1927, over a million and a half Jews lived in New York City. In contrast, the Jewish population of Chicago was 300,000 in 1933, nine percent of the total population. And by 1930, Russian immigrants made up 80 percent of Chicago’s Jewish residents. I imagine that Chicago was an easier place to live than New York, a less aggressive and less overwhelming city. People traveled there, like the characters in On Bittersweet Place, because friends or relatives lived in the city and because economic opportunities were considered good. There were neighborhoods in Chicago with a high concentration of Jewish immigrants, but nothing as densely populated as the Lower East Side.
In New York, immigrants lived in many areas, including the Bronx and Brooklyn. There were fewer choices in Chicago. But I imagine impoverished immigrants faced similar challenges in both places -- learning the language, finding work, dealing with prejudice. Established, economically comfortable Jews in Chicago (like those in New York) created institutions to help: Michael Reese Hospital, an old age home, The Society for the Burial of the Dead. Chicago had a thriving community, regional newspapers, theaters, synagogues, and an institute with classrooms, gyms, a library, a synagogue, and a clubroom, where immigrants could learn English.
LP: I didn't know that about Michael Reese Hospital, and I was born there! Writing the Jewish immigrant story has such a strong New York tradition as well. Who are some of the writers who inspired or instructed you? Anyone particular to Chicago or the Midwest?
RW: Many of the writers who inspired me set their fiction in New York. I was inspired by Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers. Also by Bernard Malamud’s wonderful short stories. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work inspired me, especially Shadows on the Hudson, a novel about immigrants who come to New York after the Holocaust, and also his short stories. I admire Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, their focus on women and ordinary experiences. David Milofsky’sEternal People influenced me, too. His novel about Jewish immigrants who settle in Wisconsin gave me a sense of the scope of relocation and ways people tried to assimilate or not
LP: Lena’s art is a strong vehicle carrying her through her adolescence -- were there any particular artists you had in mind while writing the novel? Or artists’ narratives? (My Name Is Asher Lev comes to mind for me, a huge favorite of mine as a teenager.)
RW:My Name is Asher Lev was a favorite of mine, too. I didn’t have a particular artist or narrative in mind while writing On Bittersweet Place. I admire visual artists and have a kind of wonder at what they create. I loved to draw as a child. I wanted to be an artist then, to take art classes on weekends or after school, but this wasn’t possible. I took drawing classes in college and oil painting classes later as an adult. I draw cartoons now and would like to paint again. My interest in art rose to the surface as I wrote the book. Lena’s connection to art deepened with each draft, became an important part of her character, and a vehicle to save her from the difficulties she faced.
LP: You started writing when you were working as a legal defender, and now you’re an editor at Bellevue Literary Review. Aside from the knowledge that comes with time and experience, how has that career shift changed the way you feel about your own writing?
RW: I’ve become more serious about writing. Law is an unforgiving profession in terms of time. When I was a public defender, I didn’t have time to write in a consistent way. The work was demanding (and very interesting). I couldn’t steal time from a case to write; I couldn’t shortchange a client. My work at the Bellevue Literary Review has helped me become more committed to writing, too. The work has broadened my awareness of the subjects people write and care about and broadened the type of fiction I’ve read. I’ve learned from editing at the journal that writing is truly re-writing and revision shapes a story. And working with the other editors, who are also writers, has encouraged me to think more deeply about the importance of the written word.
LP:Bellevue Literary Review is interested in the intersection of medicine and literary language. There is a lot of pathology in On Bittersweet Place—mental and physical illness, cancer, the grandmother’s gradual wasting away, an uncle’s mysterious (but definitely not unearned) death, but the family is very much outside the orbit of modern medicine. Can you comment a bit on that, and do you feel that your work with has BLR influenced the way you look at illness/medicine as a writer?
RW: [Lena’s mother] Reesa views doctors with distrust. She doesn’t want her niece to consult a doctor. The family is superstitious: if you don’t go to a doctor, you won’t need one. So much of the characters’ energy goes into surviving and learning about the new culture; medicine and doctors are peripheral unless there’s a crisis. There is pathology in the book, but I view that as the stuff of life, events a child may encounter and try to understand.
The BLR has influenced how I look at illness and medicine as a writer. I’ve read lots of stories about the medical world. I’m more aware now of medicine’s triumphs, limitations, and disappointments, of the randomness of life. And I’ve learned that a medical experience or illness in itself isn’t enough to drive a piece of fiction.
LP: Do any of the characters from your short fiction collection, Second Language, make an appearance in On Bittersweet Place (disguised or otherwise)?
RW: That’s an interesting question. There is a connection between characters in Second Language and On Bittersweet Place. Saul Chernoff, from “The Coin Collector,” was born in Russia. He would have been a friend of Simon’s and played basketball with him. He might even, disguised, be Simon (they both have auburn/reddish hair), but Simon wouldn’t have Saul’s harshness. In the story, “Second Language,” Fay Minskacoff and her husband, Max -- not the same as [Lena’s boyfriend] Max from the novel -- were friends with Lena and Simon when they were young. The story, “The Doctor” has overlap as well. When Mel Hempill was a boy, he and his family struggled and lived in a boarding house. I imagine he grew up in Chicago, possibly near Lena’s family.
LP: The novel left me with so many questions about the characters’ futures -- I found I was really invested in them. Where do Lena and Max go from here? What will her family do with their slightly-tainted-but-very-much-needed insurance money? How will her father wrestle with his conscience? What will become of her uncle and aunt, Abie and Ida, who move to Poland at the novel’s end? (This last one breaks my heart a little.) When you finished, were you glad to say goodbye to this family, or do you still think about what will happen to them outside the covers of the book?
RW: I’m happy you were invested in the characters. When I finished the novel, I was very sorry to say goodbye to them. Originally, I wrote an epilogue for the book, but decided not to include it. Unfortunately, you are right about Abie and Ida and the two children they will have in Poland. I still think of what will happen to all the characters outside the covers of the book. I imagine dialogue and scenes. For example, Max would have given Lena more of a musical education and told her with exuberance: “Chicago is the jazz capital of America.” I imagine what happens to the characters as the years pass -- where people end up, who dies when -- and also what happens to the city of Chicago. Everything changes.
Click here to read an excerpt from Ronna Wineberg's On Bittersweet Place.

Those workshops were night blind. Anything featuring black people, they reacted as if they needed a seeing-eye dog or special guide to walk them through it. It was really frustrating and tiring. The things I needed them to focus on — plot, point of view, setting — you know, the elements of fiction — came second to their need to know about the “type” of people I was writing about, or the “type” of place.

Books had always been a language my mother and I shared when she was well. And yet—once I was alone in her apartment with a stack of boxes, tasked with this move, and her books were all mine to do with as I liked, I knew one thing right away: I didn’t want them.